Tag: spelling

It took six months for someone to spot the error: the word RESPONSIBILTY, which we assume was someone’s responsibilty to correct. Oops. While the Reserve Bank of Australia has confirmed that they will correct the error in future print runs, they have also confirmed that the error exists and is, by this point, incredibly widespread. Now, 46 million of these $50 bills are floating around Australia—that’s $2.3 billion. Given that the bill is still valid currency, it’s likely they’ll stay that way.

Whoever’s job it may have been to spot the mistake, that person wasn’t the one who noticed. It was a radio listener who ultimately revealed the error, sending a local station an enlarged photo of the currency. Yes, it does say responsibilty… if you look closely.

Image Via 7 NEWS

What makes the mistake less than small (even if the print was so minute it took a magnifying glass to read) is the particular significance of the $50 note. The bills, which entered circulation in October 2018, display an image of Edith Cowan, the first female member of Australia’s parliament. Behind Cowan’s portrait are many lines of text, a repeated quotation from her first speech in parliament: “It is a great responsibility to be the only woman here, and I want to emphasise the necessity which exists for other women being here.”

Well, as we’ve established, that’s not exactly what it says.

To be fair, the print was far smaller than the mistake. Take a look at this bill, and it will become clear how someone might have missed it. From a picture, it’s hard to tell exactly where Cowan’s speech actually appears. (Hint: from a distance, it looks like grass on the lawn behind Cowan’s head.)

Image Via Tech Spot

Since there’s no way for the RBC to recall each of the erroneous bills (and no serious reason why they would) it’s safe to assume that in the future, this headline will be nothing but a collector’s item. Let’s hope that, as a collector’s item, it’s worth more than the $50 it’s printed on.

The evolution of language is nothing to fear… unless thou art living in Medieval times, which, incidentally, is when the first documented use of the singular ‘they’ took place. Some people don’t like it when words like ‘bougie’ or ‘TL;DR’ become words in a more official capacity… even though, clearly, we’re already using them. We call those people ‘elitists:’ people who think language is sacred and untouchable, that Shakespeare couldn’t drop profundities and make dick jokes at the exact same time.

Image Via The Mary SUE

One of the greatest things about language is that it’s constantly evolving to encapsulate new experiences, to help us better express ourselves. In 1996, the phrase ‘face palm’ was added to the dictionary—and you bet your ass 1996 was not the first time anyone expressed behavior so frustrating the only response was to bury your head in your hands. In 2018, the Oxford English Dictionary added ‘pansexual‘ to its lexicon, a term that had been around for nearly ONE HUNDRED years prior. Placing words we use to define gender and sexuality doesn’t define whether or not the experience exists: it does. That’s WHY there’s a word for it. What it really means is a granting of legitimacy. An acknowledgement of a lifetime of human experience.

(Don’t want pansexuality to be legitimized? Thou must get a grip.)

Image Via The Advocate

But these new Scrabble rules might just have all of us gripping the edges of the table and trying our best not to flip it… or flip out. More TWO-LETTER words? Comma on. (OK, that was bad, I know.) But speaking of OK, this word is one of the hotly contested new additions to the game. Another one is EW, which is what you’ll be yelling when someone ruins your next move. It’s not that I’m some purist who thinks ‘ok’ instead of ‘okay’ has anything to do with I.Q. points, but seriously: someone dropping a two-letter word and therein preventing you from playing any tiles is enough to make anyone face palm.

Among the more exciting new additions to the Scrabble game are ‘shebagging’ (when a female passenger places her bag on the empty seat next to her; has manspreading finally met its match?) and ‘zomboid’ (resembling a zombie, a.k.a. you leaving the club). The most controversial addition is sure to be the debatably annoying and certainly outdated ‘bae,’ a divisive term that may or may not have caused many a bae to split up.

Remember that notoriously difficult X tile? Well, with new words like ‘dox’ and ‘vax,’ you’ll be able to get rid of those bad boys. Of course, to your opponent, you’ll become the bad boy.

Gif Via Giphy

“It used to be that if you put a K down, you knew your opponent couldn’t play across the top of it – it will be a change of mindset,” said Brett Smitheram, the 2016 Scrabble World Champion. With truly chaotic energy, he added, “but that’s the joy of it.”

This morning, I saw a tweet by Twitter user @dracomallfoys in which they have carefully curated a collection of signs made amusing and honestly, fairly ominous, by the inclusion of completely unnecessary quotation marks.

I gleaned such enjoyment from this tweet that I set off on a journey to discover other examples of the phenomenon of unnecessary quotation marks, and I was not disappointed. Thrill to this collection of “slightly strange” signs spotted by the “Twitter community.”

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